The Mariner

DVELL (NOR/GBR)

Time

Price

Venue

Avant Garden

Duration

Ca. 60 min

Language

English, a bit Norwegian maybe

A room that is doubtless in an ancient castle and that appears to be round. At its centre, on a bier, a coffin holding a maiden in white. Four candles at the corners. On the right, almost directly facing whomever imagines the room, a single window, tall and narrow, through which can be seen, between two distant mountains, a small patch of ocean. Near the window five maidens hold a wake. It’s night and there’s a vague trace of moonlight.

** Co-production |** World premiere!

The mariner is lost on a distant island… On this island there were a few stiff palms, vague birds flitting among them… The mariner had no way to return to her homeland and suffered whenever she remembered it, she set out to dream a homeland she’d never had, to make it so that it was hers, and had always been—a different kind of country with other landscapes, other people, other ways of walking down streets, of leaning out windows… Every hour she built in her dreams this false homeland, never ceasing to dream…

DVELL is a unique improvising theatre company of five artists based in Trondheim, Norway. They work together building mysterious worlds, dismantling them, building them anew using sound, poetry, scenography, experimental writing, performance and visual art. Their collaborative process has grown partly from their individual art practices but primarily through working together over the years exploring a new kind of theatre, questioning what it is to be present on stage with each other. Their performances are both intimate and epic with the visual mystery of arcane ritual and the familiarity of an everyday greeting. Things grow and change like mould, memes, or potatoes.

Their new production is an improvised reading, or translation of Fernando Pessoa’s one act static drama, The Mariner (1913). The piece is supported by Teaterhuset Avant Garden, Trondheim Kommune and Norsk kulturråd.